Indigenous to the Internet / Nativos da Internet

Come 2012 and with the end of the world fast approaching it was time to change the looks on this blog. I also told myself I would begin writing here weekly, but somehow I’ve given myself more than half of the month to start on that promise. It took a real shook up, actually a shock to the system to make me jump on the keyboard. And it came once more from the north, from the draconian laws that idiotic North American bureaucrats are preparing in regards to the copyright and the internet. I’m talking about SOPA and PIPA, which will require of North American websites – Google, Facebook, WordPress, Wikipedia, you name it – that they police the content users post on the internet. So, I was happy with the blackout these sites performed last wednesday in protest of the proposed law, but will that be enough, or in 2012 this blog will have to be moved to an Icelander host?

What this legal stupidity would do for instance is that, for example, Wikipedia, served from the United States, would not be permitted to define for us what is Pirate Bay, a site served from outside the United States, with content in direct infrigement of north american copyright laws. Wikipedia, as WordPress, Google, all the big and small ones, have positioned themselves against SOPA and PIPA, but if the law passes there is not much to do and the North American internet will become as censored as the Chinese, with users hitting blocked content after blocked content.

Months ago, as I was trying to log in to my blog – this blog – I just couldn’t. Instead I had a message to contact wordpress. My blog had been blocked for infrigement, after being denounced by someone in Oregon. And so WordPress, based in California, was forced by law to shut me up. What did I do? I posted a beautful picture of the amazon river on a post about indigenous perils and survival in the jungle. Any picture posted here, when clicked, will take you to the website where I got it from. I don’t make any money of it, I don’t profit from my blog, I write for pure joy on topics I’m passionate about and I choose relevant illustrations for my content, from anywhere I can find it, crediting the site/artist or whatever. So, in my mind the kind of mentality that would go against that, is the mentality that puts profit before an important message about humanity and survival. And ironically it is that same mind, rooted on profit, that enslaves the indigenous and destroys their livelihood.

I share content. I don’t share the commercial capitalist possessive attitude that enrages people who feel it’s THEIR picture and NO-ONE can use it. Not even to illustrate a cause, an idea, with absolutely no profit in mind. What the bureaucrats don’t seem to understand is that the world changed, the internet is ours, we don’t like the buy-sell mentality, we want death to capitalism and build a society where we can freely share and inform. Are they so stupid that they don’t see that we will always find ways around their laws? That we are the fit who will survive this crucial point in evolution while them, the bureaucrats are condemed to extinction? Don’t they know we are native to the internet, that we are too many and that this is our land?